Success starts with rock-solid ITSM

For SAP SuccessFactors, world-class Human Capital Management
services require a robust IT service management foundation from ServiceNow The digital age is shining a light on the strategic importance
of Human Capital Management (HCM) by ensuring that the right people
are doing the right work at the right time and place. For many
companies, delivering on those demands requires an HCM transformation.
That can mean reshaping recruiting and onboarding, performance and
compensation, the employee experience, and more.

As a cloud services company in the business of helping customers
transform HCM to get the most out of their people, it is critical that
your own internal systems provide exceptional support for your
internal staff. That is why SAP SuccessFactors selected the Now
Platform® as the foundation on which to build IT
operational excellence.

SuccessFactors is an SAP company that offers the world’s leading
cloud-based HCM Suite. The company provides HCM services to more than
6,000 customers and 45+ million cloud application subscribers across
more than 60 industries in over 177 countries.

Like every major enterprise with global operations, SAP
SuccessFactors has experienced increasing complexity in its IT
environment. In 2016, the company was growing quickly, merger and
acquisition activity was proliferating, resulting in fragmented
internal processes. Issues and service incidents were taking longer to
identify and becoming more difficult to quickly resolve—impacting both
internal employees and external customers. As part of their cFWD
(cloud forward) initiative, SuccessFactors began the journey to
transforming how they ran IT.

“We recognized that the status quo was not sustainable,” said Mike
McGibbney, senior vice president of the company’s Service Delivery
& Operations (SDO) organization. “If we wanted to support our
clients in transforming HCM, we had to transform our own internal IT operations.”

“You could see the problem by looking at metrics like increasing
MTTR (mean time to repair),” said Alex Hernandez, senior director of
SDO service management. “Our MTTR had risen to roughly of four hours
for Level 2 security incidents. Our executives didn’t have access to
real-time metrics, and it was exhausting and time-consuming to try to
explain to customers why a service was impacted.”

The SDO leadership saw that getting to the next level in service
delivery would require a rock-solid ITSM foundation. “We were focused
on four promises to our customers,” said Hernandez. “Increasing
availability, speed, transparency, and maturity. The Now Platform
gives us a way to ensure we are able to accomplish all of those goals
while also making it easy for us to integrate existing tools and data.
The value is in a single platform that unifies and streamlines our processes.”

The ServiceNow advantage? In a word: integration The Now Platform® permitted SAP SuccessFactors SDO
to modernize incident, change, problem, and configuration management,
as well as customer impact and notification capabilities. More
specifically, the platform allowed them to integrate and gain
visibility into multiple processes, data sources, operational KPIs,
and IT financial metrics. Now SDO leaders can see the “big picture”
across multiple data sources and make better decisions about how to
prioritize next steps in delivering cFWD cloud support for the digital enterprise.

“ServiceNow brought everything together and gave us much needed
transparency with consolidated, data-specific dashboards,” said Scott
Ames, vice president of SDO Governance. “It integrates issue-tracking
data and our monitoring tools into one unified view, which makes our
operational governance and decision-making much easier and more
accurate. It’s also allowed us to achieve our goal of a world-class
ITIL maturity level of 3.0.”

Go-live and preliminary results in just 100 days Having selected the Now Platform, SAP SuccessFactors SDO set an
aggressive implementation deadline for Phase 1 of implementation of
just 100 days.

Working closely with the ServiceNow team, SDO rolled out Phase 1
across its operations in Budapest, Bangalore, Reston, and San
Francisco, implementing complex application integrations across
incident and change, customer notifications, and single sign on
(Active Directory/LDAP). The team also developed a business service
CMDB containing more than 1000 configuration items used to track and
manage the incident, problem, and change processes while also
developing over 300 service support groups across the 900+ internal
SDO/SAP users.

The ServiceNow team also assisted SDO with readiness and reskilling.
The team delivered 32 different training sessions, including ITIL
training, “Lunch and Learns,” and recorded audiovisual sessions to
1,300 users. Partnering with Accenture, the ServiceNow team
implemented process workshops to provide flexibility for each process
area while preserving organizational business rules. Weekly status
calls with senior leaders from Accenture and SDO ensured speedy
resource mobilization and alignment to eliminate issues.

Early results show a significant drop in MTTR for Level 2 severity
incidents already with a 32% reduction from 4.06 hours in May 2017 to
just 1.28 hours by August, 2017 with steady downward progress
projected for the months ahead. In addition, ServiceNow calculated the
following results based on SDO data:

2,435 FTE-hours per year saved in change creation

563
FTE-hours per year saved in incident creation

$400,000
savings in the first six months of transformation

“We’re seeing the results, not just internally but also with our
customers,” said Mike McGibbney, SVP, SDO. “They’re more confident
than ever in our ability to deliver, which leads to more business and
greater loyalty.”

ServiceNow Inspire engagement facilitates executive buy-in Every transformation vision requires executive advocacy and
sponsorship, which is not always an easy task for an IT organization.
It can be challenging to translate technological change into business
value—and even more challenging to quantify the expected results in
business terms to gain the necessary internal sponsorship and support.

To assist with that effort, SuccessFactors SDO senior executives
engaged with ServiceNow Inspire, an executive advisory practice, to
review their current plans and create a forward-thinking, strategic
plan to continue to leverage ServiceNow capabilities. The Inspire team
conducted a Business Value Workshop, which is a face-to-face meeting
with business and IT leaders to not only show them what was possible,
but also to calibrate the business potential and create a technology roadmap.

At the workshop, the Inspire team helped executives connect the
company’s vision— enabling clients to get the most out of their human
capital—to specific strategic drivers and business outcomes that ITSM
transformation would contribute to and drive. For example, the Inspire
team highlighted the connection between operational excellence and
lower operational expenses, reduced risk, and higher productivity.
Inspire also showed how these capabilities in turn led to business
objectives such as increased customer confidence, accelerated
innovation, and operational and service excellence.

These business outcomes were then tied directly to IT capabilities
and initiatives and a strategic roadmap to focus on: eliminating
service outages, using analytics to optimize performance, improving
governance and compliance, and internal executive alignment. The
Inspire team also linked the business goals to specific metrics for
measuring success; such as MTTR, reduction of emergency changes,
decrease in database service request cycle times, and decrease in
operational costs.

I admit it, I used to think of ServiceNow as a ticketing system. Now, I see ServiceNow as a key strategic partner

Mike McGibbney

Senior VP, Service Delivery & Operations

The Inspire team helped executives and leaders visualize what was
possible in terms of improving the user experience, the power of data
and how to link specific views to internal and external customer
communications. The team presented graphical examples of an enhanced
look and feel for service requests, IT Service Health, and leveraging
the full portfolio or operational dashboards in ServiceNow®
Performance Analytics for real-time decision-making.

The next step of the transformation journey is now underway with
Phase 2 of the ServiceNow deployment, including implementation of
additional ServiceNow modules such as the Service Catalog and Service
Request Management, Release Management, Knowledge Management, and
Extension of Business Service CMDB to Asset Level.

“I admit it—I used to think of ServiceNow as a ticketing system,”
said Mike McGibbney. “Now, I see ServiceNow as a key strategic
partner. The ServiceNow platform is transforming ITSM, and it’s
capable of far more than that. We’re just scratching the surface of
the business value it’s going to deliver for SAP SuccessFactors.”